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Making WordPress faster

There are many quality WordPress web hosts available, that put performance before profit. Once you find one, you will realise that there is no need to compromise on your website speed as it is part and parcel of what they do, it’s not a “chargeable optional extra”.

Most people when they embark on a speedup exercise, run their website through speed tests such as GT Metrix.

The biggest mistake you can make when you do this is focussing on the Grades or Scores. They are only half the picture and in a lot of cases, do not translate into faster pages as you can see by the image below.

The best thing to do is go through each section and fix what you can, do not waste time trying to fix stuff on third party websites, you can’t, accept this and move on.

When you have fixed what you can, the next thing is to move to the Waterfall view where you will get a granular view of what is actually slowing your site down.

If you need a managed service or have specific requirements, get in touch with us via https://optimisation.io where we can give you proper advice on your situation and goals.

First, to keep users on your site they need to have the page load as quickly as possible. A long wait time can be dangerous as visitors can give up and click away (higher bounce rates), meaning that you’ve lost an interested visitor, that you have no doubt worked hard to get to your site in the first place.

And possibly, most importantly, the amount of time a user spends on a page will be minimal and their return rate will also be low.

However, by gaining a better understanding of how web pages work, it’s easy to adjust a website to increase its performance. This means more than just reducing the bytes on a page.
Google provides a tool known as PageSpeed Insights to help you test the general compliance of your WordPress web pages and help you identify what needs to be done to improve them. A scoring system analyses the page performance and so it’s become custom for everyone with a website to want to achieve the perfect score of 100/100. Just always keep in mind, these are scores and not relevant to actual page load time, they are just indicators to help you understand what you can do to improve. Other tools such as GT Metrix and Pingdom also test the actual page loading time and you have a choice of server locations, so can pick the one closest to your target audience.

Unfortunately, network signals are limited in speed and there will always be some data to transfer. The data is the suitcase for the signals that are travelling; they weigh it down. While making them as light as possible will help, they will always weigh something. The solution? CDNs. Content Delivery Networks make servers geographically closer to users to reduce the waiting time between request. That way the network, even with its suitcase, has a shorter distance to travel and will, therefore, reach its destination faster. It’s the only real way to reduce the requests that are sent and received involving the server and the best solution to this problem. PageSpeed scores are complicated because they are affected by the physical distance between a user and their nearest server. Luckily, this can work in your favour by properly planning your hosting infrastructure. CloudFlare is a great example of an all-encompassing solution.

Loading a web page often involves many requests, not just the one. This happens when the URL corresponds and the browser discovers there are more resources needed and launches a lot of other processes. Sometimes these include CSS, JavaScript, font files and more. No matter what, they involve individual requests and response times, meaning they can add up and cause a low page speed. Being realistic means not necessarily aiming for the perfect score, but one that is satisfactory for both you and your visitors. Prioritise both latency and compression for the ultimate results and have faith in the fact that once a server has been found, the browser will not need to search for it again provided your host has a good back-end caching system in place. Cache is everyone’s friend, but only to be used as the last stage of your WordPress Hosting By making cache the final step, you ensure that everything else is as good as possible before you get to this point. Adding the cache as the first step leaves too many factors for bad hosts to ignore.[/ultimate_heading][vc_column_text]Cache is everyone’s friend, but only to be used as the last stage of your WordPress Hosting By making cache the final step, you ensure that everything else is as good as possible before you get to this point. Adding the cache as the first step leaves too many factors for bad hosts to ignore.

Other things to keep in mind when undergoing your WordPress speedup— Image compression is important, optimising images can sometimes be the single most important thing you can do, big images, take long to load, especially on mobile connections. Plenty of tools exist to help reduce image size. A well-optimised Database not only helps keep everything running smoothly but can also have a direct bearing on your page load times because it’s easier to find the information.